Abstract

The following series of short papers by Lisa Baraitser, Patrick Hanafin, Clare Hemmings and Rosi Braidotti, emerged out of a ‘Talking Books’ event hosted by The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in November 2008, in which a panel discussed Rosi Braidotti's 2006 book, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity) with the author. In Transpositions, Braidotti deals with ethical and political subjectivity in contemporary culture, making a strong case for a non-unitary or nomadic conception of the subject, against the claims of ideologies such as conservatism, liberal individualism and techno-capitalism. She argues that a new form of ethical accountability is called for that takes ‘Life’ as the subject, not the object, of enquiry. This ethics is presented as a fundamental reconfiguration of our being in the world and it calls for more conceptual creativity in the production of worldviews that can better enable us to behave ethically in a technologically and globally mediated world. The nomadic ethical subject negotiates successfully the complex tension between the multiplicity of political forces on the one hand and the sustained commitment to emancipatory politics on the other.